ASTRONOMY AND PERSPECTIVE

IN THE CITIES FOUNDED BY ALEXANDER THE GREAT

FERRO Luisa, (I), MAGLI Giulio, (I)

Abstract. During his life Alexander the Great revived, in a original way, the Greek tradition of
town's foundations. Scores of cities are attributed to him, although only few have been
documented archaeologically. The paradigm of Alexander's towns is Alexandria, founded in
331 BC. In the present paper we examine the topography and the astronomical orientation of the
original urban system, and show that the choice of the venue was mainly due to religious and
symbolic reasons. Alexandria was actually the prototype of a series of Hellenistic towns
designed as “king's towns” and aimed to convey the ideology of the divine power of their
founder; these towns all had a spectacular axis of perspective. The prototype of such axes is the
Alexandria Canopic road, which turns out to be orientated to the rising sun on the day of birth of
Alexander the Great and to the “king’s star” Regulus. A second family of towns, related also to
military criteria and orientated close to the cardinal points, is discussed as well.

Key words and phrases. Ancient town planning, Ancient Astronomy, Alexander the Great,
Alexandria

Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 01A16, 51-03

1 Introduction

The foundation – or also re-foundation – of towns was certainly one of the characteristics of
Alexander the Great’ conquest policy. Some were simply military settlements aimed to settle part of
the army and control the territory, but others were founded with the aim of being “true” Greek
colonies, with civilization purposes. The tradition of town foundation was then inherited by the
Hellenistic Monarchs.
Alexander is the pioneer of a new concept of civilisation, based not upon the conventional
dichotomy of Greek and non-Greek but upon a universal equality of status and understanding.
Diodorus the Sicilian, compiling in the first century BC and supported perhaps by implication in
passages of Strabo, Plutarch and Arrian, cites a memorandum by Alexander which professes to
show that he was beginning to think in international terms. Whether literally historical or not, the
memorandum has a certain ring of truth about it: he was planning to create “cities with mixed
populations, to transplant people from Asia to Greece (Europe) and in the opposite direction from
Greece to Asia, and so to establish the greatest continents in common unity and friendly kingship by
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intermarriages and domestic ties”. On such showing, it can be claimed for him that he was the first
true internationalist [1,2].
The prototype of Alexander's towns is certainly Alexandria. The foundation of Alexandria was a
truly symbolic act, inspired by “religious” criteria and aiming at the celebration of Alexander’s
power and divine nature [3]. As a consequence, the ideology of power can be seen reflected in the
city design. We report here on recent work aimed at understanding the way in which all this was
achieved with the use of astronomy an perspective [4]. Further, we extend our approach here to the
whole series of “related” towns and show that they actually divide into two groups: a group of
“king's cities” clearly inspired by Alexandria, which in most cases exhibit a similar “perspective”
plan based on a longitudinal axis and similar astronomical alignments as well, and a second group
of “military” towns which are mostly oriented to the cardinal points as were the corresponding
Roman's “castra” (fortified military camps).

2 Geometry and Astronomy in the urban plan of Alexandria

Alexandria is the most famous and important city founded by Alexander the Great. The
town, founded in 331 BC [4], can be considered as the outcome of a long debate on the idea of
“ideal town”: indeed both Socrates and Plato repeatedly prefigured the birth of the ideal city. The
inspiring principles are based on harmony as related to the laws and the divine, reflected in the
mathematical rigour of the design of the “Hippodamean” city plan [5,6]. Foundation of Alexandria
can be seen as the beginning of a series of new towns, those of the Seleucids, which will repeat its
inspiring principles [2] . The city becomes an explicit representation of the power of its divine
founder, the rigorous order of its plan being a reflection of the “cosmic” order, in compliance with
the “orthogonal grid” principles. The orthogonal grid of Alexandria can still be perceived, and
forms the basis for an ongoing project of reassessment of antiquities into a coherent architectural
scheme of fruition [7,8,9]. The original matrix route was conceived on the basis of a main
longitudinal axis, later called Canopic Road. This road played the role of an “extended center”, a
wide, longitudinal open space, with the main buildings distributed along it, thus avoiding the idea of
a “central point” as the focus of the urban plan. The first to put in evidence such a “longitudinal”
character in the original project of Alexandria was 19th century astronomer Mahmud Bey Al-Falaki
(1861). Later excavations along the modern street showed that the Canopic Road was actually
deeply etched in the rock subsoil. The axis is thus a peculiar characteristic, a sort of icon in the
foundation of the city, and as such it is an independent architectural unity [10,11,12,13,14].
In spite of what is emphatically reported by Plutarch in his Life of Alexander (26, 2-3) and
by Diodorus Siculus (17, 52) the site where the newly founded town was built did not have special
characteristics of suitability. In particular, the city was planned in a strip enclosed between the sea
to the north and west, the marshy lands of the Canopus mouth of the Nile to the east, and Mareotis
Lake to the south, in contrast with many of the healthy criteria of Alexander's tutor, Aristotle [15].
Another characteristic (to be discussed later on) which clearly conflicts with utilitarian principles is
that the orthogonal grid seems to be not conformal to the characteristics of the landscape. As
mentioned above, the rectangular grid of Alexandria was based on the so called Canopic road, a
spectacular axis which crossed the city leading to the Canopic mouth of the Nile and the Canopus
(today Abukir) bay. At the opposite ends of the street two main gates were located; at least since the
work of Achilles Tatius (early second century AD) the east and west gates were called Gate of the
Sun and Gate of the Moon respectively [16]. The Canopic road bears an azimuth of 65°15’ ± 30’
(measured directly and validated with existing sources), and the horizon to the east extends towards
the Abukir bay and was therefore flat in ancient times; the same holds to the west.

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Tav.1 Alexandria, reconstruction scheme of the original town plan

Tav.2 Alexandria, a early 19th century photograph showing the Canopic road looking west.

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In 331 BC the azimuth of the rising sun at the summer solstice - occurring on June 28 (all the dates
in this paper are Julian) - was 62° 20’ (today it is slightly displaced due to the variation in the
obliquity of the Ecliptic). It can of course be said, therefore, that the orientation of Alexandria axis
at 65° 15' is “solar” in that the sun was (and is) rising along this direction twice a year. The dates
are July 24 and the symmetric date in relation to the summer solstice, June 2. The range - one
degree wide - centered on azimuth 65° 15', was spanned by the rising sun in a period of a few days
before and after this date, respectively. We have recently proposed that the city was orientated to
the rising sun on the day of the birth of Alexander the Great. Alexander was indeed born on July 20,
356 BC, and in the 4th century BC the sun was rising at Alexandria on that day at an azimuth 64°
30', only 45' less than our best estimate for the azimuth of the Canopic Road (of course, the Julian
date of birth of Alexander has nothing to do with the calendar in use in that earlier period; for a
complete discussion about the issue see [4]).
Due to the waving of the lunar calendars and to differences between different local calendars, the
Greeks elaborated astronomical methods to act as harbingers for relevant festivities [17,18,19]. The
Alexandria alignment was operational also in this sense. Surprisingly indeed, the “King's Star”
Regulus (alpha-Leonis), was at that time rising at the very same azimuth (65° 20' at altitude of one
degree, appropriate for the visibility of a first magnitude star) and had heliacal rising very near to
July 20. Association of Regulus with the king was already extremely old (it is documented in
ancient Babylonian sources such as the Mul-Apin) but it is certainly a fortunate circumstance for
Alexander to be born in Leo, and association of Regulus with kingship will be strengthened during
the Hellenism. In particular, it has been recently recovered in the funerary monument of Antiochos
I, King of Commagene, at Mount Nemrud [20]. The monument, constructed in the first half of the
last century BC, is well known for the famous “lion horoscope”, depicting Mars, Mercury, Jupiter
and the crescent moon in Leo, the constellation of Regulus [21]. Belmonte and Garcia have shown
that the two terraces of the monument are orientated to the solstices, but also that the huge plinths
holding the colossal statues in the eastern terrace point to sunrise around 23 July and the heliacal
rising of Regulus, the date of the celebration of Antiochos’s ascent to the throne mentioned in the
inscriptions of the monument. The coincidence with Alexandria is really striking, considering that
Antiochos makes explicit reference to Alexander the Great as one of his ancestor.

3 Alexander’s and Seleucid’s towns

As recalled above, Alexander the Great founded many cities, most of which are scattered in a west-
to-east progression following the route of his conquests. Further, many cities were founded by the
Seleucids, and it is known that Alexandria has been considered as a sort of model town during
Hellenism. In particular in the Farther East a rather extraordinary experiment occurred, being the
scene of the interaction between the Greek civilisation and those of Babylonia, Iran and India. The
Greek empire of Bactria and India was an Hellenistic state and so must be treated. The Seleucid
Empire was not centralized and no imperial citizenship, because the governor of a Eparchy had an
organisation ready to his hand, even to a basileion or palace residence. Following the idea of
Alexander, the Greek settlement of Asia under the Seleucids is a complex of contiguous and quasi-
autonomous city states, the whole under a quasi-divine king who managed policy and order [22].
In Table 1 we present the available data on those cities which have been documented
archaeologically, either because they are still inhabited or due to excavations. All such cities are
based on an orthogonal grid. In the table, the orientation of that axis which lies in the first quadrant
of the compass is reported. Data have been extracted from maps and compared with high-definition
satellite images to align to true north; the expected error in this procedure – mainly due to flatness
distortion effects - does not exceed 1°.

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NAME FOUND. AZIMUTH SS/WS

ALEXANDRIA 331 BC 65° 20' 62° 20'/117° 40'
ALEXANDRIA of ARACHOSIA
(KANDAHAR) IV B.C 28° 61°24' / 119°16'
ALEXANDRIA in ARIA (HERAT) 330 B.C 88° 60°23' / 120°17'
ALEXANDRIA ESCHATE (CHUJAND) 329 B.C 65°40' 57°36' / 123°4'
BALKH (ALEXANDRIA OF BACTRIA) IV B.C 33° 59°21' / 121°19'
ALEXANDRIA in CAUCASUM
(BEGRAM) IV B.C 5° 60°7' / 119°3'

ALEXANDRIA of MARGIANA (MERV)

alias Antioch in Margiana IV B.C 89°30' 58°57' / 121°43'
AI-KHANUM (Greek name never found,
sometimes supposed as Alexandria on the
Oxus) IV B.C 34°30' 59°9' / 120°01'
ALEXANDRIA of SUSIANA alias Antioch,
later Charax Spasinou 324 B.C 86° 61°38' / 119°02'
ALEPPO 333 B.C 89° 59°35' / 121°05'
46°70' /
ANTIOCHIA on the ORONTE 300 B.C 39°40' 59°36' / 121°04'
APAMEA on the ORONTE 300 BC 89° 59°56' / 120°44'
DAMASCO 332 B.C 86°10' 60°42' / 119°58'
DURA EUROPOS 303 B.C 65° 60°13' / 120°09'
LAODICEA at the sea IV B.C 2° 59°54' / 120°06'
IV sec.
SELEUCIA on the TIGRIS B.C 25° 60°52' / 119°48'
TAXILA IV B.C 2°10' 60°36' / 120°4'

Tab. 1 The towns founded by Alexander and by the Seleucids and documented archaeologically.
For each town ancient and modern name, approximate date of foundation, azimuth of the axis in the first quadrant, and
solar azimuths at the solstices are given.

In such cities, two families can be immediately singled out.

3.1 The cardinal family

In this family, containing 10 cities out of 17, the axes are all found in an interval of ±5° with respect
to true north. These cities were probably inspired by military camps and forts. The idea of military
colony goes back to Alexander, but some clues seem to show that Alexander learned a lot about the
organization and logistics of the army from the ancient Egyptians, inspiring himself to another
“great” whose campaigns he certainly saw represented in the Luxor temple, Ramesses II. The
Egyptian camps were indeed oriented to cardinal points as well as the Greeks; the army of the king
of Epirus is also documented.
Traditionally Alexander founded 70 cities; but comparatively few can be identified (Alexandria
Egypt, Alexandria in Aria, Alexandria of Arachosia, Alexandria in Bactria, Alexandria Eschate,
Alexandria in Caucasum); the same is true of many of the cities attributed to Seleucus. The first
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Antigonus continued Alexander’s system, as did the early Seleucids, but it is only rarely that we
know under which king any particular colony was founded. A military colony was settled either
with time-expired troops, sometimes mercenaries, or with men able and willing to serve; normally it
was located at or beside a native village, and it was usually founded by provincial governor upon
the king’s order; the king had to provide the land and the money required, but he did delegate the
actual work to a subordinate. The purpose of the military colony was primarily defence: those in
Bactria-Sodgiana, started by Alexander, were to safeguard the frontier against nomads.
It was a planned foundation; perhaps a stereotyped form existed. In the Mediterranean countries the
great majority of settlers were Greek and Macedonian, but east of Euphrates this elements tended to
become thinner. Greek was always the official language.
The aim of every military colony was to become a full polis, which in the East meant a city, not
necessarily of Greek nationality, but of Greek organisation and civic forms; there was a steady up
ward growth of the colony into the polis, and it was this which before the end of the second century
BC had filled Asia with Greek cities [1,22].

3.2 The Alexandria-like family

In this family either the axis considered is orientated very close to that of Alexandria (Alex.
Eschate, Dura), or the orthogonal axis points to the symmetric direction, that is, to sunset instead of
sunrise. This is the case of the most important of Seleucids towns, Seleucia on the Tigris, which
was founded in 300 BC by Seleucus I Nikator (305-281 BC) [23] . The site is not far from
Babylon, where Alexander died on June 10, 323 BC and where the first residence of the Seleucids
was established. The topography of Seleucia is manifestly inspired by that of Alexandria, with a
main longitudinal road and a regular urban matrix nested on such an axis [24,25,26,27]. The
“Canopic” axis of Seleucia is not the axis of the first quadrant (azimuth 25°) but the orthogonal one
at 115° . Therefore, it points 25° north of west which is specular with respect to the meridian to the
Canopic road of Alexandria. Would Alexandria and Seleucia be at the same latitude, the sun with a
flat horizon would thus set in alignment with the longitudinal axis at Seleucia the very same days as
at rising in Alexandria. Due to the slight difference in latitude the sun was actually setting along this
direction on the days around July 27, with a slight displacement, but in any case still very close to
the date of birth of Alexander. As well as in Alexandria, there is also a close concordance with
Regulus, whose setting occurred approximately at azimuth 294° 40' . It is therefore tempting to
speculate that also Seleucia, being inspired by Alexandria both symbolically and practically, but
being also close to the place of death of the revered king, was orientated towards the same
astronomical targets, but at their settings.

The remaining three towns have an orientation which requires further studies, but is likely
topographical.

4. Conclusions

Among the possible symbolic aspects related with foundation and to be considered in the analysis
of a town’s project are, of course, geometry and orientation. We presented here the first results of a
project aimed at understanding the way in which the ideology of divine kingship was embodied in
the towns founded by Alexander the Great and his successors. Two main characteristics come out
from such an analysis: the first is the idea of the “main axis” which opens up the perspective of the
town. Such a main axis breaks, in a sense, the monotony of the orthogonal grid, introducing an

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“extended point of attraction”. Second, the astronomical orientation of such axis, related to the sun
and the stars on the birthday of the founder. Both such features appear to be established for the first
time with the foundation of Alexandria. A second family of towns also exists, were the axes are
orientated cardinally. Several influences can be hypothesized here, including Egyptian and Assyrian
camps but also the Buddhist foundation ritual.
All in all, Alexander the Great confirms himself, once again, as “marking a major devide in the
broad history and archaeology ideas” as Sir Mortirmer Wheeler once said.

ALEXANDRIA of MARGIANA (Merv)

TAXILA

APAMEA on the ORONTE

Tav.3 Three examples of the cardinal family of towns

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ALEXANDRIA ESCHATE (Chujand)

SELEUCIA on the TIGRIS

DURA EUROPOS

Tav.4 Three examples of the Alexandria family

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Acknowledgements

The present work arises within a vast research project (entitled Archaeology and Architecture)
devoted to the enhancement of the Archaeological Areas of Milan, Alexandria, Athens, Afghanistan
co-coordinated by Angelo Torricelli whose constant help and encouragement is gratefully
acknowledged. The project includes a collaboration with the University of Torino, the Alexandria &
Mediterranean Research Center, the Department of Architecture of Menofeya University, and the
Italian Archaeological Mission at Alexandria coordinated by Paolo Gallo. The current project
mission is operating under an International Protocol of scientific collaboration with the Supreme
Council of Antiquities (SCA) of Egypt. Architect Viola Bertini, Elena Ciapparelli and Maria Luisa
Montanari, who have worked on images, and students Marina Bianconi and Valentina Sala are also
gratefully acknowledged.

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Current address

Luisa Ferro
Faculty of Civil Architecture
Politecnico di Milano Italy
luisa.ferro@polimi.it
+39 02 23995618

Giulio Magli
Faculty of Civil Architecture
Politecnico di Milano Italy
giulio.magli@polimi.it
+39 02 23994505

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